Loopy Transparency or Transparent Loopiness?

Administrators claim to value transparency but practice it in a loopy manner.

¶ In a Rump Parliament post on 27 June 2011 ["Faculty Meetings, Administrators, & Deliberation"] I opined that expecting transparency from faculty meetings was contrary to my experience at the University of Puget Clowns. Last June a memorandum regarding faculty meetings had suggested that faculty would not feel "out of the loop" and would be "in the know" if faculty attended faculty meetings and read memoranda in which decision-makers made their decisions and decision-making transparent. I derided this communique as a transparent, loopy excuse for blindsiding faculty on tuition benefits for dependents. http://rumpparliament.blogspot.com/2011/06/faculty-meetings-administrators.html

¶ As the plenary meeting of the faculty on 20 September 2011 begins to unravel, faculty must ask themselves anew whether faculty meetings harm mental health. One who attends faculty meetings exposes herself or himself to transparent loops that entangle the mind by weaving webs of facts and folderol.

¶ On 20 September faculty were regaled regarding the School of Education. That report contained some numbers about an alleged shortfall in profits from the Ed School. The Faculty Governance Forum has since exposed the numbers as tendentious accounting at best. We'll see if administrators favor faculty with more suspect "data" at next week's faculty meeting. Probably the administrators will rely on faculty obliviousness and inattention to let the matter drop from awareness. We'll see.

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¶ What we see already is that the transparency about which faculty read in June will be iffy. Maybe administrators are eager to keep faculty "in the loop," as the 6-27 memorandum suggested, but maybe the faculty's feeling "out of the loop" had far less to do with non-attendance at faculty meeting than it had to do with the nature or quality of information provided faculty in faculty meetings and inmemoranda. Maybe administrators who have often been far from open have changed their ways, but maybe professions of transparency are the latest camouflage.

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¶ And maybe the numbers to which faculty were exposed on 9-20 will turn out to be misleading. The Faculty Governance Forum recently featured the information that the School of Education is debited for the square feet of their offices. What other creative cost-accounting does the Jones Hall practice? For how long has the university charged which departments at what rates for office-space?

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¶ This tactical accounting seems consistent with a tactic used when earlier administrators were trying to eliminate Occupational and Physical Therapy. The strategy then was to isolate OT/PT as an entity that lost money. When I asked the dean and the president why OT/PT was measured in such a manner yet various departments outside OT/PT were not, I was told that the trustees had decided to count in such a manner. A circular argument circles the wagons and keeps me "in the loop." That is how the university has often practiced transparency.

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¶ I did not expect transparency. I expected loop-the-loop. I expect more loopiness to follow. So perhaps the call for greater attendance at faculty meetings was more than the excuse for which I took it in June. Was it as well precondition for misleading the faculty? After all, what is the point of a magic show without an audience? Why, that would be like a confidence game without marks!

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